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Page added on June 17, 2012
The Intersection Of Information And Energy
Technology Review has a series of reports on the intersection of computing and the electrical grid, including this article by eSolar’s Bill Gross on improving the price and performance of solar thermal power plants – a textbook example of Bucky Fuller‘s concept of “ephemeralization” – The Intersection Of Information And Energy. I believe that we will need great ingenuity to enable our planet to provide successfully for more than seven billion human beings, let alone the nine billion that will probably inhabit it by 2050, and I believe that information technology will make this ingenuity possible. Because of fluid marketplaces and an ever more globalized economy, nearly every important resource is becoming scarcer and more costly. Evidence of this is seen in the price not only of oil but also of aluminum, concrete, wood, water, rare-earth elements, and even common elements like copper. Everything is getting more expensive because billions of people are trying creatively to repackage and consume these materials. But there is one resource whose price has consistently has gone down: computation.
The power, cost, and energy use involved in one unit of computation is declining at a more consistent, dependable rate than we have seen with any other commodity in human history. That declining cost curve must be tapped to lower energy prices—and I believe it will be. This will happen as people ask: To achieve my purpose (in designing whatever device or system), can I use more “atoms” or more “bits” (computation power)? The choice will have to be bits, because atoms are going up in price while bits are going down.
Here are a few examples. When designing a car, one can put a bit more effort into stronger, lighter-weight materials, which will increase energy efficiency but possibly drive up cost; or one can put a lot more effort into using computational power to run simulations that optimize the use of materials. Today, computational fluid dynamics allow a designer to accurately design a new shape of car, put it in a computer wind tunnel instead of a physical one, and test 1,000,000 body designs to improve fuel mileage by significant amounts. This was never before possible for those constructing vehicles.
In solar energy, large fields of mirrors or photovoltaic panels can be optimized to be lighter, more reliable, and more power-efficient by putting a $2 microprocessor in every panel. An onboard computer that lets each panel track the sun independently replaces previous systems that used more steel, bigger gears, and bigger gearboxes—basically, more materials. As little as 10 years ago, the computing power and sensors needed to build a closed-loop, sun-tracking solar panel might have cost $2,000, or more than the panel itself, and thus the system would not have been cost effective. But with computing costs coming down by a factor of 1,000 every 15 years, all kinds of new opportunities arise to improve system design.
At eSolar, one of our companies, we designed and built a utility-scale solar-thermal power plant with a huge amount of computation embedded into the field of mirrors. We reduced the size of the components, cut the installation expense, and drove the cost of the system down to nearly half what had been achieved before. This experience proved to me the feasibility of replacing atoms with bits.
The price reduction curve for computing is not over—it’s continuing, and each year will open up further avenues for ingenuity. That is important because our current energy resources are not at all easy to compete with. Fuels that we dig out of the ground and burn are extremely cheap. They are, in effect, the concentrated storage of millions of years of sunlight falling on Earth. Ironically, the biggest component of energy costs is the expense of moving the fuel to consumers from where it’s obtained—and transportation costs are mostly fuel, too. So we are in a kind of vicious cycle. The way to break free of fossil fuels is to introduce something new to our energy equation that isn’t fuel.
I believe ingenuity in the form of information technology is the only variable that offers sufficient leverage. We need to replace a cheap, unsustainable form of energy with sustainable forms of energy that are equally cheap. The only way to compete with cheap fuels is to be more clever with computation; that is, to use as little of anything else as possible.
5 Comments on "The Intersection Of Information And Energy"
BillT on Sun, 17th Jun 2012 12:05 pm
Once more, the ‘tech to the rescue’ BS! No, there will not be a tech renascence, nor will the population ever get to 9 billion mouths. This is just another ad for a scheme to make lots of money off of the suckers and the government taxpayer trough before it all collapses. Nothing new here folks, move along.
Arthur on Sun, 17th Jun 2012 5:18 pm
Opel Astra: 75,000 Watt
Apple iPad: 2.5 Watt
In a modern society some 60% of the workforce sits behind a computer. In Holland they drive an average 37 km per day in an average car like the Opel Astra to get to their desks. They could stay at home using a tablet with extremely low energy footprint. The new trend will be for office workers to stay home or work in a community office at walking distance from their homes and log in to the company server. Here technology offers a tremendous opportunity to much needed large scale demand destruction. This will be a defining event for the rest of the decade. Fossil fuels will only be used to transport goods, not people, unless you want to make love to your girlfriend.
DMyers on Sun, 17th Jun 2012 6:57 pm
Come on, Arthur, surely they will come up with virtual reality orgasm stimulation along with artificial “feeling creators” for love and romance. The only reason to waste gas on your girlfriend is procreation, and they’ll probably figure out an avoidance of even that little inconvience.
BillT
That’s what I call getting your point across in a few words. I have a very similar sense of the whole thing.
Trying to look at it with an open mind, I find it to be too abstract to draw any firm conclusions. I admit, a few concrete applications are described.
The author states that his company has improved the performance of solar energy production and even cut in half the cost of a solar-thermal power plant.
A fifty percent reduction of anything is significant. However, there are many issues with solar power which prohibit it from playing more than a marginal role in replacing fossil fuels. Among those are grid limitations and component material availability – which fall among what the author describes as “atom” concerns which are not subject to “bit” solutions.
There is reference to design facilitation, such as in building automobiles. It seems to me that there has already been access to much greater efficiency design to automobiles, and yet half the late model vehicles I see on the road every day are big boxy, inefficient SUVs. I’m not saying that refutes the point, but it suggests to me a marginal contribution from the application.
Arthur’s point is one of interest, working at home as one way to save energy, thanks to the computer. As he showed, there is a measurable benefit. I know people who work from home. They still drive around a lot. And lower level workers, like fast food service workers would probably sooner be replaced entirely by computers than become flat screen web cams that say “Can I take your order?” It remains to be seen, but I think this working at home will also prove a marginal solution.
Ultimately, the greatest contribution technology could make to resource depletion is to replace humans altogether, and maybe now that computation is so super cheap, those who would make that their goal will have the wherewithal to make it happen.
Arthur on Sun, 17th Jun 2012 8:25 pm
DMyers is right of course, you can send your dna by mail, maybe in the future even my email as a piece of text. No need for irresponsible usage of a car even here.
BillT on Sun, 17th Jun 2012 11:26 pm
Does anyone really think that all of these office type jobs will exist in the future? I don’t. Why would they? Think through the contraction that we are in and you will see that you will NOT be purchasing anything by internet. You will NOT be shuffling numbers like they do today. You will NOT be surfing the web for free. You will NOT be doing much of anything that you do today. Construction will cease. Fast food will cease. The wide variety of goods from all over the world will end. Etc. For 20 years, we have had the ability to teach over the internet, but how many schools have been replaced by laptops at home? Tech hype or is it hope? ^_^